Zionism and Christian Zionism "from the river to the sea"
Israeli leaders have long endorsed a partnership with Christian Zionists, seeing a necessary political efficacy in working with evangelicals. Though most Christian Zionists only support a Jewish state in Israel because of an antisemitic belief it will bring about an apocalypse during which Jews will be cursed and Christians will rise to Heaven, Israeli politicians have understood that this powerful American political bloc serves their short-term interests.1 [my emphasis]
So wrote Mira Fox last year, explaining who the rightwing fundamentalist Christian preacher John Hagee is and why he’s welcome at many events held in the name of supporting Israel. This (un)holy alliance between rightwing and mostly white American Christians, on the one hand, and hardcore Likudniks like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other, is one of the stranger pieces of present-day American politics.
Here’s a 12-minute report from 2018 on the American Christian Zionist movement2:
In countries like the US and Germany, supporters of Israel’s current war on Gaza civilians have tried to stigmatize the phrase “from the river to the sea” - when it’s used by people protesting Benjamin Netanyahu’s current war policies. But Likudniks and Hagee-style Christian Zionists otherwise have to problem with the concept. The Likud Party platform of 1977 explicitly states: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (my emphasis)
And Netanyahu has reiterated his commitment to that version of Greater Israel during the current conflict.
The drive to establish the “Greater Land of Israel” is the central ideological goal of the Likud Party, which has dominated Israeli politics since 1977. The commitment to Greater Israel was enshrined in the “Basic Laws” of the Israeli state in 2018 when the Knesset passed the “Nation State of the Jewish People” law. This law states that the right to national self-determination in Palestine “is unique to the Jewish People” and that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” This commitment is one of the “guiding principles” of the current Israeli government, which stated that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” including “Judea and Samaria.”3 [ [my emphasis]
Christian Zionists like John Hagee are enthusiastic about supporting that same Likudnik version of “from the river to the sea.”
Shalom Goldman writes about the background of Christian Zionism in the US:
In the United States, The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative evangelical theologians, emphasized the necessity to believe in the literal truth of scripture. This helped reify the relationship between the Jews of the present and the Israelites of old. In the view of many in the Christian West, Palestine was understood to be ‘‘empty,’’ and this emptiness should be filled by Jews, the descendants of the land’s ancient biblical inhabitants. The phrase ‘‘a land without a people for a people without a land’’ conveyed this view in a very concise and pithy manner. The idea was first promoted by Christians.
In 1853 Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper) wrote that Palestine was ‘‘a country without a nation’’ in search of ‘‘a nation without a country.’’ He made this observation during the Crimean War, when the continued viability of the Ottoman Empire came into question. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, continued Turkish rule in Palestine came into question. In Shaftesbury’s view, first expressed two decades before the Crimean War, Christians needed to support a Jewish restoration so as to prepare the stage for the Second Coming. As Shaftesbury was a friend and relative of Henry John Temple Palmerston, the British foreign minister, his views had considerable weight. Palmerston opened a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838. Two years later, Shaftesbury wrote that ‘‘Palmerston has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people.’’ A half century later, the phrase ‘‘a land without a people for a people without a land’’ was popularized by Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill.
From Zangwill’s writings the phrase, translated into many languages, became a mainstay of Zionist polemics.4 [my emphasis]
An Irish Anglican clergyman, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), was a major influence on the kind of apocalyptic beliefs that leading American Christian Zionists like John Hagee promote. Darby split from the Church of England to become part of a Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren, ow which he eventually became the main leader. The views of the Brethren about the return of Jews to the Holy Land dovetailed with British imperial ambitions in the Middle East.
However, Robert O. Smith cautions against assuming that Darby himself was the originator of what we know today in the US as Christian Zionism. Smith does credit him with developing a conception of the End Times known as “premillenial dispensationalism,” which does have a major influence on how today’s Christian Zionists view of the Return of Christ and the events leading up to it. Darby also visited America and promoted his notion of the Last Days. However, while “Darby taught that Jews had a special role to play in God’s eschatological [End Times] plan,” which today’s Christian Zionists also accept, “Much of Darby’s writing is highly speculative; even in his published work, his ideas can seem incomprehensible.”5
Sean Durbin tries to brings some comprehensibility to part of Darby’s vision involving Israel and the End Times:
Beginning especially in the 1970s, American evangelicals influenced by this theology began to fuse prophetic speculation with geopolitics. The 1970 publication of the Hal Lindsey’s best-selling Late Great Planet Earth helped to bring dispensationalism into the American mainstream. By merging political realities of the Cold War, the Iranian Hostage Crisis [of 1979-1981], and growing awareness of terrorism, with theological predictions that seemed to be confirmed through Israel’s military victory [in the Six-Day War of 1967], Lindsey and authors like him opened up a discursive space in which these contemporary military and cultural threats could be mapped onto dispensationalists’ prophetic readings of scripture. More recently, the events of September 11, 2001, the War on Terror, the Iranian leaderships’ verbal threats to Israel and the United States especially under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad …, and the ever-increasing calls to engage Iran militarily have all managed to invoke the real world violence and conditions for Christian Zionists to affirm the reality of their prophetic speculations and their belief that Jesus’ return is imminent. The antagonistic relationship between Iran and the United States and Israel is especially significant for Christian Zionists because of the role they have assigned Iran in the unfolding of prophetic events.6 [my emphasis]
Smith also calls attention to the fact that European and American Christians before the 19th century also read the Biblical passages about a return of the Jewish people to the former ancient Israel as something they expected to happen in the future. And that expectations of sweeping political changes that could be somehow understood as prefigured in Biblical prophecies attracted a great deal of interest as democratic and nationalist movements became stronger in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In other words, there are a lot of elements in the Christian tradition that can be interpreted or cynically adapted to fit present-day political programs.
Fox, Mira (2023): Who is John Hagee, the Christian Zionist pastor who spoke at the March for Israel? Forward 11/14/2023. <https://forward.com/culture/569725/john-hagee-march-for-israel/> (Accessed: 2024-16-01).
Why Evangelical Christians Love Israel. VICE News YouTube channel 05/15/2018. (Accessed: 2024-16-01).
Khalidi, Rasid (2023): It’s Time to Confront Israel’s Version of “From the River to the Sea”. The Nation 11/22/2023. <https://www.thenation.com/article/world/its-time-to-confront-israels-version-of-from-the-river-to-the-sea/> (Accessed: 2024-16-01).
Goldman, Shalom (2010): Excerpt: The Christian Roots of Zionism. Religion Dispatches 01/17/2010. <https://religiondispatches.org/iexcerpti-the-christian-roots-of-zionism/> (Accessed: 2024-03-01).
Smith, Robert O. (2013): More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism, 141-162. New York : Oxford University Press.
Durbin, Sean (2020): From King Cyrus to Queen Esther: Christian Zionists’ discursive construction of Donald Trump as God’s instrument. Critical Research on Religion 8:2, 119. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2050303220924078>